A Peek Into Graviton2
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
There is a real need for people who want to do development/test with on-premises servers, and then migrate the end product to an AWS or similar environment. At least with AMD64 you can reliably do this.
Pay it no mind that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises: don't worry, you're not being ripped off any more than usual! All of those big "unicorn" tech companies you look up to are doing it—everyone from BP to GE to the people who rip you off on concert tickets to the guys that made Fortnite—it's all the rage, nowadays!
That $20,000,000 in venture capital you got could surely be used to set up a dev environment for almost two whole months! Call now and we'll even throw in three whole extra days (throttled by 50%)!﹡
﹡Restrictions may apply. Not valid in the state of California or to companies registered in Delaware. We reserve the right to change the terms of the agreement without prior notice.
Is there any truth to this? Every time I see this claim, it is actually comparing the price tag for servers in the on-prem case with the price tag for compute on AWS/etc (which includes a whole lot of engineering and data center management costs). It's a pretty meaningless comparison.
My guess is that AWS has the economies of scale to outperform your average private data center on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.
I could double the cores and mem probably too.
Or you could get an eight core / 32GB ram machine for under $230 on eBay.
So in reality I will always times the cost of server ( over X months period ) + colocation / month by 2.5. And Double that to give them Margin for support etc.
That is roughly 5x the cost. And in most cases seems to be what AWS is charging for.
Not saying I agree with their pricing.
If you operate at sufficient scales to amortize the fixed overhead of operations (which is not that large of a scale), you can break even running your own server infrastructure within 12 months versus AWS if you know what you are doing. That last part is a big caveat, but not a large hurdle.
There are other considerations but in pure hardware terms, on AWS you've bought the hardware after 6 months of utilization.
My guess is the advantage evaporates.
A bit of browsing on Geekbench suggests that one a1.4xlarge instance (i.e. two a1.2xlarges) is roughly comparable to a Ryzen 3400G. Adding in rough costs for the other components (motherboard, power supply, case, and 32GB of RAM), a bare-metal system equivalent to an a1.4xlarge looks like it would cost maybe $500-600 to buy outright.
In other words, if all you care about is raw CPU performance, then over long periods of time AWS costs more than 10x as much as bare-metal per unit of performance, even with up-front reserved instances.
Oh and you need a DR site too, so double it.
And staff up 4x for 24x7 operations and build an orchestration layer yourself.
I’ve done the math in a lot of scenarios, including (especially) staff time. Running your own real data center doesn’t make long-term financial sense unless you are in the mid-hundreds of physical servers.
Colo might make a bit more sense for some situations, but there’s a reason so much is being moved to cloud providers. The people doing it aren’t stupid.
For 3 months, I was charged $11,$23, and finally $4 for 3 days of the 3rd months, where I QUICKLY cancelled the server...this is OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive for a single processor, 1G RAM, 30GB SSD cloud server!
$37 for some 64 days is totally overpriced. You can get high quality low cost cloud servers for less then $5/month, and if you purchase a full year, half that.
Amazon really disappointed me with their FREE bait-n-switch bullshit marketing, and I will NEVER recommend their low end servers again.
Only this many cents to use this thing, which, heh, I guess it requires this thing too, and this thing, and this thing ... man, some of these cents are adding up. Oh, a "NAT Gateway" is $30/mo? Well, OK. Keep going for a few weeks and you're staring down a bill for a rather scary number of cents while the CFO's angry rants can be heard half-way across the office.
There are entire consultancies that specialize in decoding AWS bills. Let's not pull leg here.
We don't necessarily care about matching absolute production performance, but could throttle things to get the right ratio between performance of CPU, memory bandwidth, disk IO, etc, in order to explore which code tweaks will have the biggest relative impact on your workload. It would let you do a bunch of your testing and optimization locally, for free.
Could be an edge to distinguish you from the competition, although I'm not sure it's a big enough one to warrant a business case. Maybe it would be attractive to shops whose development costs are high compared to production (i.e. startups and enterprises with lots of ongoing customization), but probably not so much for the established, internet-based businesses where I'm guessing the big money is (like Netflix).
Make a free game, capable of cross-platform multiplayer across nearly all devices, and let people waste their money on skins and dances that give no competitive edge if they want to.
Not to mention the environmental impact of doing so.
First the software, then the hardware: This is the ultimate lock-in.
Also I haven't used Anandtech in a while, but it hasn't changed much at all after their redesign a while back. I'm a fan of how it hasn't changed much. Nice and simple, though a bit more social media stuff that I remember.
I'm excited for ARM because of the pressure it will put on Intel, and also because of the cost savings. However it seems like AWS has a lot of work to do to make it useful.
- docker
- kubernetes
- go
- rust
- python
- node
- .net core
- java
- C/C++
In AWS there is one extra step to deploy it than an Intel cluster. And that's only because it is in preview.
Haven't really looked into it... it's on my todo list to look at cross-platform builds to target Raspberry Pi devices, will probably setup containerized cross platform builds for at least node, rust and .net core for my own use.
Would a more AWS-oriented benchmark suite make more sense? Test Java, run PHP/Ruby/Python/Node, see how many pages you can serve with Apache/NGINX, run queries in MariaDB/Postgres, see how much you can stick through Mongo/Redis...
Quite a headline
> it means that they also implement the v8.1 ISA which add new instructions such as atomic compare-and-set (CAS).
> you should pay very close attention to make sure your software stack is compiled against Arm v8.1 or higher (N1 is v8.2).
But my understanding is that the new atomics are in an extension, so just compiling to v8.1 may not get the new atomics.
Anyone know what the situation here is? What has to happen to get the compiler to use LSE atomics?
I just completed a us-west to us-east migration for a client because after a lengthy benchmark session we learned that the instances we really needed for our specific workload could not be AMD based. I tried a handful of AMD boxes and sent them through the ringer, but the Intel boxes always came out on top. The cost of these is significantly lower in us-east, hence the migration.
Not to knock AMD, but in the presented configuration from AWS the comparative Intel<>AMD instance types vary greatly. There is also no compute-heavy instance type from AMD at this time (AFAIK please correct me).
For reference our workload is network (outside AWS), Compute and RAM heavy. The c5.2xlarge seems to be the sweet spot as far as cost/performance.
So if you’re considering Graviton, make sure to design and run some real benchmarks. For us (in the AMD scenario) things looked real good on paper but after benchmarking the performance was not there.
us-west-2 ec2 pricing is on par with us-east-1 and us-east-2, were you originally in us-west-1 (everything is considerably more expensive in that region)?